Group recommends road map to national health information network.

• Author: Swartz, Nikki
• Position: News, Trends & Analysis

A group of 13 health and IT organizations recently provided the Bush administration with recommendations for a road map to a U.S. health information network. The group's report suggests the principles that should guide the creation of such a network and calls for nonproprietary technical standards for communication across the network.

The report states that to improve care and reduce costs, patient information must be able to be sent and shared freely across the network among hospitals, laboratories, specialists, insurers, and researchers. According to the 54-page report, the federal government should guide the development of a health network by providing some initial financing and endorsing basic technical standards but should set up a separate "standards and policy entity" to handle the task.

The report concludes that a national health network should not include a central database of patient records nor should it require individuals to have health ID cards, as some have proposed. It says patients should control their own records, deciding whether and how their information can be used.

One goal is to enable the health network to operate somewhat like Internet based e-mail, in which people using different types of computers and software can send and receive messages because the open, standard technology for handling messages is used by everyone. An article recently published in the online version of the journal Health Affair estimates that $78 billion a year could be saved by moving to electronic patient records in a network with...